Florentina of Oberweimar

Florentina von Oberweimar (* around 1506; † unknown) was a German nun ("unwillingly"), a follower of Martin Luther and a pamphlet author of the Reformation .

Live and act

On her father's side, Florentina came from the Oberweimar noble family of Oberweimar , and on her mother's side from the von Watzdorf family, also from Thuringia . At the age of six, Florentina came to the Cistercian convent Helfta near Eisleben . This was once considered the "crown of the German women's monasteries". Abbess was Katharina von Watzdorf, who was related to Florentina through her mother.

At the age of 11, the girl came to the conclusion that she was not suitable for a monastery life. However, Florentina was not allowed to return to worldly life. So she went through the novitiate up to the monastery vows at the age of 16. She then read the writings of the reformer Martin Luther and under their impression made her first attempt to escape from the monastery in October 1523. This failed, and as punishment beatings and the stay in the monastery prison followed. Then in December 1523 Florentina wrote a request for help to her relative Caspar von Watzdorf , "as a famous lover of evangelical truth" (her phrase). In the meantime, the monastery prison had been replaced by Florentina's cell arrest for life. Luther advised Caspar von Watzdorf to help the girl to escape, which then succeeded (before April 1524).

The fall was one of the occasions for Luther to take a public position against the establishment of the monasteries as such. In 1523 he wrote the text Cause and Answer that virgins may divinely leave monasteries . Florentina either found refuge with her relative von Watzdorf or - as the Catholic Luther opponent Johannes Cochläus claims - stayed with Martin Luther himself for some time. Florentina wrote down her painful experiences in the Helfta monastery, also to defend herself against defamation of the abbess by publishing them. The pamphlet was entitled Eyn story how Got eyner Ehrbarn monastery Jungfrawen helped out . Luther provided it with a foreword in the form of a letter to the Count of Mansfeld, who remained Catholic, as well as a concluding remark and put it into print. The pamphlet had six print runs within a year. The marginal notes that have survived in some editions may also come from Luther. The script is represented in the editions of Luther's works. It also found its way into the martyr histories of Ludwig Rabus and the Jungfrauenspiegel by Conrad Porta as an evangelical testimony of faith . The further life of Florentina von Oberweimar is unknown.

Hundreds of nuns and monks left the monasteries in the early 1520s, as did Luther's later wife Katharina von Bora from the Nimbschen monastery . The Oberweimar monastery closed its doors as early as 1525 as part of the Reformation, the Helfta monastery was secularized in 1542.

literature

• Florentina von Oberweimar: Eyn story how Got eyner Erbarn monastery Jungfrawen helped out. Pamphlet. Wittemberg 1524. Digitized in 2008 at MDZ (Munich Digitization Center). Digital library. URN: urn: nbn: de: bvb: 12-bsb00027618-8 [1]
• Dorothea Kommer: Florentina von Oberweimar. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon. Vol. 23, 2004, Col. 1031-1033. http://www.bautz.de/bbkl/o/oberweimar_f.shtml ( Memento from June 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
• Antje Rüttgardt: Exits from the monastery in the early Reformation: Studies on pamphlets from 1522 to 1524. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 2007, ISBN 978-3-579-01645-0 .
• Sonja Domröse: Florentina von Oberweimar - violence in the monastery. In: Sonja Domröse: Women of the Reformation. Göttingen 2017, pp. 89–101.

Web links

• Florentina von Oberweimar in the church lexicon ( memento from June 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive )